A Novel Reliable & Efficient Data Harvesting Mechanism in Wireless Sensor Networks with Path- Constrained Mobile Sink

At present, many researchers concentrate on the researches of sink mobility and propose a lot of efficient data harvesting algorithms for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In general, these algorithms mainly formulate their ideas in two ways, namely path-controllable and path-constrained sink mobility. In most application scenarios of WSNs, mobile sink is path-constrained and a big challenge of it is avoiding Packet Loss (PL) when the sink is in moving. In this paper, we propose a novel reliable and efficient data harvesting mechanism named Economical & Manageable Sub-sinks Mechanism (E&MSM) for WSNs with path-constrained mobile sink. We argue that deploying some enhanced economical and manageable wireless nodes as sub-sinks regularly at accessible positions after deploying normal sensor nodes randomly in unreachable area. Simulation results validate our proposed mechanism and prove that E&MSM can improve network lifetime dramatically. This paper aims at giving the theoretical reference for practical applications.